Pharmacy Research UK Announces First Project Grant Recipient

As part of Pharmacy Research UK (PRUK)’s £200k investment in major project grants, we are delighted to announce first recipient of our 2017 project grants. Professor Bryony Dean Franklin from UCL School of Pharmacy has been awarded nearly £93k to investigate the use of patient-held information about medication (PHIMed) to support medicines optimization over 18 months. Professor Franklin is Professor of Medication Safety at the UCL School of Pharmacy and Director of the Centre for Medication Safety and Service Quality at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

The overall aim of the project is to identify how PHIMed is used in practice, barriers and facilitators to its use, and key features of PHIMed that support medicines optimisation, leading to development of an optimal PHIMed solution for testing in a future trial. The research will involve collaboration with the UCL Interaction Centre and involves two lay partners as collaborators to ensure that patient and carer perspectives are embedded throughout.

Specific objectives of the project are:

To explore perceptions of patients, carers and healthcare professionals around barriers and facilitators, benefits and unintended consequences of PHIMed;

To document how PHIMed is currently used in practice;

To identify key PHIMed features likely to be required to support medicines optimisation;

To describe PHIMed tools used / available within the UK, both paper and electronic, and the extent to which these provide the key features identified;

To inform development of a PHIMed solution for testing in a controlled trial on patient outcomes;

To make initial recommendations in relation to the current use and future development of PHIMed.

Dr Rachel Joynes, Executive Director at PRUK said:

“We are delighted to fund Professor Franklin and her team at UCL. The quality of applications for these grants was extremely high and we are excited to fund this vitally important project. The risks of poor health information transfer are well known and we hope that this project will start to address some of those issues.”

Professor Franklin said:

“We know that when people move from one healthcare setting to another (such as from their own home to hospital), errors can occur in communication of information about their medicines. We also know that many patients want to be more active partners in their healthcare and that many use different types of patient-held information about medication (abbreviated to “PHIMed”), both paper and electronic, to help them remember their current medicines. However, we do not know how PHIMed should best be used or what the most important features are. Discussions with patients and carers also suggest this is an important area. I am therefore absolutely delighted that PRUK are enabling us to do this research.”

PRUK is the principal funder of pharmacy research in the UK. Founded as a result of a merger in 2012 of two previous research funding charities, PRUK has a broad programme of research in place. PRUK funds both research projects and individual bursaries to improve skills across the pharmacy sector. Registered charity number 1148335.